Chinary Ung, composer

Education: Member of first graduating class of Cambodia’s National Music Conservatory; Manhattan School of Music, bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music; Columbia University, Doctor of Musical Arts

Professional: Northern Illinois University, the University of Pennsylvania, Arizona State University and UCSD (since 1995)

Achievements: Grawemeyer Award (1989; the first American composer to win the award) and honors from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Kennedy Center and the Guggenheim, Koussevitzky, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations. Performances by the Philadelphia Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony and others.

Personal: Lives in the UTC area with his wife, violist Susan Ung. They have two children, both in college: Kalean (at Cal Arts) and Sonika (at Chapman University).

Anyone enrolling in Chinary Ung’s composition classes at UCSD is going to learn about a lot more than music. “I used to tell my students: Some of you have high intelligence and are very talented. And if you wanted to, you could work very hard. But with just these three things put together, it won’t click,” said the Cambodian-American composer. “You won’t be anybody in composition. You tell me: What are you missing?”

With his 1989 Grawemeyer Award, widely considered classical music’s Nobel Prize, his Friedheim Award from the Kennedy Center, and numerous performances by ensembles around the globe, Ung is somebody.

The New Zealand Herald, reporting on “O Cambodia,” a concert in Auckland earlier this year that included Ung’s “In Memoriam,” called him a “a major international figure.” And the Herald found a “sense of catharsis” in his music, which the Connections Chamber Music Series will present in concerts in Encinitas and Mission Viejo next weekend.

Ung’s highly spiritual, otherworldly music draws on a range of Eastern traditions and techniques, including having instrumentalists vocalize while they play. But he is more interested in addressing that missing element, especially with his students, than outlining the specifics of his compositional practice.

“I try to guide them on the intangible situation,” Ung said in his office at the University of California San Diego, where he has taught since 1995. “Where is your heart? What are you doing? What is your message? Does it boost your ego only, or does your music communicate to people? Does it empower humanity? Or is it just a form of self-indulgence?”

Ung has spent a lifetime looking into his heart, considering his circumstances and contemplating the fragile nature of life.

He came to the United States in 1964 on an Asia Foundation scholarship to study clarinet at the Manhattan School of Music in New York City. As part of the arrangement with the foundation, he committed to return to Cambodia when he had completed his master’s. But on a visit with some of the New York-based Cambodian diplomats who had helped him, he had a chance encounter in an elevator with one of the foundation’s former officials.

The individual invited him to his office, they had a chat, and one thing led to another. Ung obtained a scholarship to study at Columbia University, which allowed him to stay in the United States (although he returned briefly to Cambodia before starting at Columbia).

“The point is this,” Ung said. “If I did not go (to that office), and I did not take that elevator at exactly the perfect time, I would have been sent back to Cambodia (permanently).” There, he would have soon faced Pol Pot and the murderous Khmer Rouge. ﻿And with their disdain for intellectuals, Ung said, “I would be gone in no time at all.”

That was the fate of many of his family members, including three brothers and a sister. They perished in the genocide that claimed approximately 2 million lives.

“Life is so delicate,” Ung said. “It is so scary when you look back at that. It’s incredible. But I’m lucky. I’m not complaining.”

Ung put the clarinet aside and studied composition with the Chinese-American composer Chou Wen-Chung ﻿at Columbia, where he earned a doctorate. But his education had just begun.

Spurred by the political turmoil in Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge’s attempted eradication of traditional Cambodian culture, Ung stopped composing and immersed himself in the music of his homeland, even learning to play the roneat ek, a Cambodian xylophone.

He contacted Cambodian musicians, dancers and scholars and initiated performances and recording projects (two volumes of traditional Cambodian music for the Folkways label) while teaching first at the University of Northern Illinois and then at Connecticut College. With other Cambodian musicians and students, he formed a pinpeat, a traditional Cambodian ensemble he had first heard as a boy in the fields.

“When I heard it for the first time, I was enchanted,” Ung said. “It was like, ‘Oh my God!’ It was just like I’m in paradise. I never realized until later that I made myself a musician because of that experience. Also because of the war: If there was no war, I’d say, ‘Hey, a bunch of people are playing this instrument and preserving the art and so forth. Why bother?’ But I felt responsible.”

At first, his work with Cambodian music had little effect on his “serious” music, which was steeped in the post-serialist, experimental aesthetic he had learned at Columbia.

“Back then, I imagined a circle with a solid vertical line in the middle,” Ung said. “This is Cambodian music and this is my own music, which was derived from my Western training. I made it clear: I don’t mix the two.”

Between 1974 and 1985 he wrote a single piece of “classical” music, “Khse Buon” for solo cello (or viola). In it, he tentatively started breaking through that boundary. With 1986’s “Inner Voices” (which won the Grawemeyer) and especially in 1987’s “Spiral” (which won the Friedheim), he found his own voice.

“The solid line became a dotted line,” he said. “I don’t even care anymore whether I’m being influenced by what. It’s not my concern anymore.”

The idea of a spiral — something that circles back but continues going — proved especially inspirational, prompting a series of pieces: “Spiral II,” “Grand Spiral,” “Antiphonal Spirals” and more. Ung became so obsessed by spirals he had to force himself to stop, fearful he was falling into a pattern.

“I stopped (writing spirals) for eight years,” Ung said. “How did I stop? Our house is on the top of the hill, and we built a 17-foot-diameter sunken patio (in a circular shape). And I made that not just as something in the middle of my garden in my backyard; it is a mental mark to stop me from composing this spiral.”

But his patio was purposely imperfect and left incomplete.

“It was calculated that way,” Ung said. “I don’t believe in a complete loop or circle; I always leave room for negotiation — in fight, in war, in love, in teaching, in anything.”

Now a U.S. citizen, he left room to visit Cambodia in 2002 and remains committed to the cause of Cambodian music and culture. He frequently lectures and performs in Asia and is the principal curator for the 2013 Season of Cambodia festival in New York.

“It took me a long time to realize, yes, music is something I love to do, but it’s not at the top of my list anymore,” he said.

“Humanity, friendship, solving the suffering of your friends, yourself, reaching out to people, and so forth. There’s a list probably pretty long. And then there is music.”

Works by Chinary Ung

Upcoming premieres and releases:

May 21, 22, 2011: U.S. premiere of “In Memoriam” in Encinitas and Mission Viejo (commissioned by the Connections Chamber Music Series of California and the New Zealand Trio)

June 3, 2011: U.S. premiere of “After Rising Light” at California State University Santa Barbara in collaboration with the Asian Young Musicians Connection

Late 2011: Release of “Spiral XI: Mother and Child” (with Susan Ung) and “Spiral IX: Maha Sathukar” on Bridge Records (the third in a series of Ung’s work on Bridge; the first Bridge CD was named one of the top 10 classical CDs of 2009 by The New York Times; the second was named one of the top 5 American contemporary classical albums of 2010 by NPR)

2012: Premiere of “Spiral XIV,” commissioned by Zeitgeist (with a grant from Meet the Composer and Chamber Music America) and premiere of Viola Concerto commissioned by the S.E.M. Ensemble (funded by the Jebediah Foundation New Music Commission)